While output as well as investments by private firms have all but dried up, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan sees raising production from fields given to state-run firms on nomination basis, or without bidding, as key to achieving the target.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan will on June 28 launch the NDR, which will aid India to switch over to an open acreage licensing regime where companies can choose areas they want to explore.

India imported 18,000 tonnes of petrol and 39,000 tonnes of diesel in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha.

Now that he's done with his near 21-year stint as Saudi Arabia's oil minister, during which his utterances could move everything from crude to currencies and stocks worldwide, Ali al-Naimi says he doesn't want to talk about the market anymore.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget for 2017-18 last week, proposed to "create an integrated public sector 'oil major' which will be able to match the performance of international and domestic private sector oil and gas companies."

The deal was signed by India's oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan and a representative of ADNOC after a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UAE's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

The Iraqi oil ministry said on Tuesday that it had cut its production by 160,000 barrels per day since the beginning of January. By the end of the month, production would be cut by 210,000 bpd, it said.